Two Kinds of Classified Information - National by Mark Kleiman The latest WikiLeaks flap raises, once again, the problem of revealing classified information. Some of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan material—the names of individual Afghans who are working against the Taliban, some of whom are now sure to die as a result—represents exactly the sort of stuff that any government would reasonably try to keep secret. Of course attempts to keep such things secret are never perfectly successful, but—especially against a distributed set of enemies rather than a single unified enemy such as the USSR—just making some kinds of information harder to get can serve legitimate security interests. But equally of course, most classified information is not of any of the above types. When I was young and irresponsible, I worked for the Justice Department analyzing drug policy. Having been cleared, what did I learn that it would then have been a felony for me to reveal? Nothing that would have helped the Russkis or the narco-bad-guys.
How WikiLeaks Is Affecting Journalism | Novel Copy Now that the dust has settled after the immediate reaction to WikiLeak’s release of secret Afghan war logs, clearer lines can be drawn concerning the event’s significance. The most fundamental distinction to be drawn is between the technical and moral implications of the leak. Today I will look at the technical implications, on Wednesday, the moral ones. From a technical standpoint, the event is a sign post for how news organizations function in the information age and how small non-state actors can hold governments accountable (governments whose resources are incomparable in scale). On the first point, how news producers work nowadays, a democratized media means that everything not behind a paywall is instantly copied and repeated on the Internet. As a result, a general economic rule holds: scarcity makes information much more precious. On Wednesday I’ll ask and answer if WikiLeaks is a net boon for the world, or an overall villain.